


A Foolish Hope for Mercy

by Maleficar



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 05:35:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2801471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maleficar/pseuds/Maleficar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Blackwall's secrets are revealed, Evelyn confronts him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Foolish Hope for Mercy

“My lady,” Blackwall said, rising and moving toward her.

Evie recoiled, lifting a hand. “Don’t,” she said, her voice hoarse with feeling. She was holding back tears – of anger, of frustration, of disbelief and hurt. “Not here. Not now.” She turned to Josephine, curling her fingers into tight fists. Her nails pierced her palms, and the pain gave her clarity of focus. “Thank you,” she said stiffly, and then she strode down the stairs to the dais, ignoring the look of crushed hope on Blackwall’s face.

She couldn’t deal with him. Not at the moment. She’d just sacrificed hundreds of hours of political maneuvering to save a liar for _love_ , and as glad as she was for his salvation she felt equally disgusted.

So she went to the Herald’s Rest and tried to get drunk. But instead of drinking, she held her mug of ale in her hands and stared into its depths as though it could tell her something profound about the universe and her choices. It couldn’t, of course, it was just a mug. And no one went to her side to offer sage advice. She felt the weight of Bull’s gaze, watched Varric’s eyes skip over her as if she weren’t there. Even Dorian looked at her and then away, studiously finding a note pinned to the wall more interesting than her distress.

She deserved it, their condemnation. Who let a murderer walk free? Intention didn’t clear a man’s conscience. Blackwall – Rainier – could have had the best intentions in the world but he still allowed the murder of an innocent woman and her children. He could have stopped his men. He could have changed things. He could have, in that moment, been a better man.

Dragging a hand through her hair, she gazed bleakly at her mug. Hadn’t that been what the rest of his life had been about? Being a better man? But could you be a better man after seeing the right choice staring you in the face and turning your back on it? Or would you always be that person? Now, going forward, she would always have that moment where she wondered if it would be this battle, this moment, where he might step aside because someone had given him enough coin.

Releasing the mug, she pressed her cold fingertips against closed eyelids until light burst against her lids. What if Corypheus gave him enough coin? No. No, Corypheus wouldn’t do something like that. He was too focused on... whatever his goals were. Destroying the world, perhaps. She was a fly to him. A gnat buzzing around his head. He wouldn’t waste his time bribing her Inner Circle.

But that didn’t mean someone else would behave the same way. Evie was well aware that she had as many allies as she had enemies – and perhaps even more of the latter. How many people had she crushed in order to cement alliances that would protect the world? How many lives had she ruined?

A little groan escaped her. How was she different than him?

Because she was the face of an organization tasked with an impossible mission. Blackwall had made a choice for himself, a singular decision to gain money at the cost of human lives. Evie, ruthless as she sometimes was, chose the many over the few.

She dropped her forehead to the table. Inhaled the scent of stale alcohol.

When she lifted her head, she didn’t feel much better, but she couldn’t let herself stew. On her way back to her rooms, she flagged a runner. “Send Warden—” She broke off. What was she supposed to call him now? “Send the man called Blackwall to my rooms.”

The runner actually hesitated. He simply looked at her for one second too long, and Evie felt a mix of shame and self-loathing that turned her stomach. This would look terrible, of course. There would be whispers in the morning. The Inquisitor, the Herald of Andraste, chosen of the Maker, was bedding a child-killer. Regardless of whether or not she did. And she had no plans to. She just needed to talk to him.

Talking would help. Perhaps.

“Now, scout,” she snarled, and the scout darted off.

With a sigh, she climbed the stairs to the main hall. Waved blearily at Leliana. “Are you well, Inquisitor?” the Spymaster asked.

“No,” Evie said simply, letting the door to her quarters swing shut behind her. No, she wasn’t well. She wouldn’t be well. She was a fool. A fool was leading the most powerful organization Thedas had seen in years. A fool was responsible for the world.

By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she burned with anger. By the time Blackwall – Rainier, Thom, whatever his name was — appeared, looking chagrined and nervous, she was furious.

“Do you,” she exploded, flinging her arms wide, “have any idea what you’ve done?” Flames jumped between her fingers, arcing explosions of heat.

In the silence that followed, she reflected that it was a stupid question.

Blackwall lowered his head. “I am aware,” he said softly.

“Are you?” she demanded. Because the question was more than _Do you understand you are a liar and that I can't trust you_. “Are you absolutely aware?” There was an ugliness in her voice, a furious loathing, that she couldn’t contain. It was everything evil and wrong and disgusting. She knew she ought not be shouting at him like this, that screaming would accomplish nothing and vitriol would only salt open and bleeding wounds. But she couldn’t stop herself. She was so hurt, her heart ached so much, that she had to lash out.

Her anger was a wall between them. Armor to guard her bleeding heart.

Uncertainty clouded his features. “My lady—”

“I am not your lady!” she shouted. Fire exploded around her hands, a burst of flame that was gone in a second, but all around the room her candles flared. He took a step back, one hand finding the balustrade behind him.

“If I have hurt you,” he began, and she let out a strangled, shocked laugh.

“If you have hurt me? _Me_?” she demanded. “You’ve hurt _everyone_! Everyone will look at us now and wonder if we’re all hiding something, if we’re all lying about something. When people speak of the Inquisition, they will forever talk of the man who pretended to be a Grey Warden after he butchered a family for coin. You haven’t just hurt me, don’t you understand that? We’re meant to be a force to protect this world, and you have damned that entire mission, put the whole of the Inquisition under scrutiny, because you _fucking lied_.” She spat the words, slashing one hand through the air.

He jerked back as though she’d struck him physically, his eyes wide, his mouth open. His silence spoke volumes. Or perhaps it didn’t. She had no idea what to read into that silence because she’d done nothing but read him wrong so far.

When he finally spoke, his words were low, his voice tense. “Then why did you give me over to the Grey Wardens?”

“To deny you the absolution of death,” she snarled.

They both froze. He wore the look of a man completely broken, a man stripped of every last vestige of human dignity. The wall meant to protect her, the barrier meant to keep him out, shattered. Crumbled. And it left her as one raw, aching, bleeding wound. She was an exposed nerve, and if she felt so achingly awful, she couldn’t imagine how much worse he felt.

Maker, she wanted to address what he’d done to the Inquisition, not destroy him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, blinking to hold back tears. “I’m so sorry. I...”

“And now it seems you know how it feels to commit an unpardonable act as well,” he said, his voice devoid of feeling.

She turned from him, going to one of the chairs by the hearth and leaning heavily against it. They stood in crushing silence, and she wondered why he didn’t go. She would have gone. She would have left the entire Inquisition.

“If this had been about me and only me, it would be different,” she said into the silence, still not looking at him. “If the lies hadn’t jeopardized everything the Inquisition is... We have to be above reproach. We have to be above scrutiny.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

Those six words ripped her heart from her chest and threw it to the ground. It splattered there, still thumping weakly.

"I don’t know what I want,” she said. And, finally, she started to cry. She sank to her knees beside the chair, tears streaming down her face as she held back her sobs. She hadn’t ever cried in front of someone else. Not in front of her parents when they gave her to the Circle, not when her best friend died in his Harrowing, not ever. No one saw Evie cry. Evie the Mediocre. Evie the Perpetually Passable. Evie who had, for one glorious moment, been something more than anyone else.

She had made this about _her_ when it should have been about him.

His footsteps rang against the stone, so unbearably loud. She expected him to leave, but instead he knelt before her. Through the blur of her tears, she saw his hands, strong and capable and covered in blood, no different from her own except in size, curl over his knees.

“May I hold you?” he asked, his voice heartbreakingly soft and tender.

Lifting her face, she met his eyes, and she saw forgiveness there. “I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve your tenderness after what I just said.”

“You spoke the truth. I shouldn’t have continued the deception. When you came to me, when you sought Blackwall, I should have told you the truth.” He looked away from her, and his fingers tightened on his knees. “I should have... I should have done so many things differently. But we are our actions, Lady Trevelyan.”

“We must both be pretty terrible then,” she said with a weak laugh. “Does that offer still stand? Will you...” She swallowed, unable to bear asking the question. If anyone in the room was undeserving of affection, it was her, not him.

His hands slipped up her arms, drawing her against him. “Always.” He pulled her against his chest, shifting so that she was between his splayed legs, and she curled into his heat. Into the solid strength of his body.

Gently, he tipped her head back. His eyes ghosted over her face, not meeting hers, and that was fine with her. She couldn’t stand to look him in the eyes. She just needed his closeness. His warmth. The assurance of his strength that stood between her and the rest of the world. Then he slowly, haltingly, lowered his lips to her cheek. He gave her plenty of time to push him away, but she didn’t. Couldn’t.

His lips brushed the tears off one cheek and then the other. “You shouldn’t cry over me,” he told her. “I’m not worth your tears.”

“After everything I just said, I’m not worth much either.” She swallowed hard. “I don’t expect your forgiveness.”

“But you have it. Immediately. Unconditionally. And I will spend the rest of my life doing whatever it takes to keep the Inquisition out of the mud. If that means you leave me here under the watch of the Commander and our Spymaster, I will accept that.” He leaned his forehead against hers, his eyes closing.

Evie touched his cheek, sliding her hand over the soft whiskers of his beard. “I don’t know where we go from here,” she admitted. “But I’d rather stumble through it with you at my side.”

“That’s a relief.” He was quiet for a second. “My lady?” He said the words so tentatively that her heart broke again. They were the whispered prayer of a broken man who knew he deserved justice but retained a desperate, foolish hope for mercy.

She was the Maker in that moment, or whatever god existed, if there even was one. She could crush him on the anvil of her wrath or she could offer him the absolution she had denied him earlier. Sliding her hand over his ear, she pressed gently against the back of his head to urge him closer as she lifted her face to his.

Their mouths touched. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a meeting, the brush of flesh over flesh. A tentative overture. A whisper of forgiveness.

Her other hand slipped over his shoulder, wrapping around his neck, and she drew herself closer to him, but she still didn’t kiss him. That was his choice. His decision. She had said unpardonable things, he had committed irreparable acts. They were the same, in that moment, two people stripped of all artifice and left completely without the invisible masks that people wore to disguise the ugliness inside them.

And then he kissed her. His lips moved over hers, and a part of her heart slid back into place, the fractured organ repairing itself just the slightest bit.

He kissed her again and then again until one kiss blurred into many and she lost her breath to his mouth. He clung to her, caging her against his body, and she gripped his tunic with knuckles gone white, terrified he might fling her away.

Instead, he pressed her to the ground. The warm weight of his body settling between his legs was familiar and welcome and unspeakably wonderful. In that moment, she understood him better for she knew she didn’t deserve his affection. She didn’t deserve his forgiveness. But that was mercy.

Her body arched under his, her fingers tangled in her hair as his tongue tangled with hers. Heat sputtered to life inside of her, spreading in a slow, languorous roll through her body. When his mouth left hers, trailing over her neck, she gasped softly, sweetly. Her fingers tugged at his hair, urging back to her mouth, but he denied her.

“Have to taste you,” he murmured. “Every inch of you.” His fingers found the toggles on her tunic and deftly released them. She shivered as he pushed the fabric aside. He leaned back and swept his eyes over her body as he released her breast band, his eyes devouring her. “I don’t—”

“Don’t,” she said, dragging his mouth to hers.

Their kiss was fierce but slow, intense but not demanding. His hands slid over her sides as his tongue traced her lips. He stroked his fingers along the undersides of her breasts as he stoked a smoldering fever inside her. Beneath him, she arched her body, needing the friction of him against her. He obliged her, settling between her legs, and rocked into the cradle of her hips.

“I will never stop wanting you,” he whispered against her mouth in the tone of a man lost.

Her fingers danced down his tunic, pulling his belt from his hips. He helped her, all but tearing the tunic from his body, and when he pressed against her, crushing her breasts to his chest, the world shifted and everything seemed brighter. Better. Righter.

“I will never stop loving you.” He kissed her hard, swift. He chased away the remains of her sorrow with that kiss, and the smolder in her belly turned to fierce fire. With a cry, one swallowed by his kiss, she threw her arms around his neck and surrendered to him. To the deliverance found in the act of loving someone else.

He stripped her with tender hands, his touches lingering. His calluses swept over her skin and made her shudder with need, her body arching toward him. A little gasp of pleasure escaped her whenever he followed those touches with open-mouthed kisses that were thinly veiled promises. He wasn’t just making love to her body, he was making love to her soul, binding them together with a physical act that pressed under her skin and soaked into the essence of who she was.

When his fingers dipped between her thighs, he groaned and she gasped. “You want me,” he breathed in shock.

Wordlessly, she rocked against him, and the tip of one finger sank into her. With a strangled moan, she worked herself over that finger, rubbing against the heel of his hand as he watched, enraptured. “Maker, you’re beautiful. So impossibly beautiful.”

She wound her fingers in his hair and drew him close, kissing him as he pressed his finger into her, curled it against her, stroked it along her muscles until she was panting and writhing and desperate for more. He played with her, knowing just how to touch her to drive her mad with desire. His thumb danced over her clit, circling and pressing and stroking, and the knife-edge of pleasure and pain coalesced into something so much more than simple lust.

Maker, was this what redemption felt like? This build of resonance until she felt like she would shatter?

He brought her over the edge with a gentle touch, her orgasm pulling pleasure from deep within her. It left her gasping and trembling, but not so far gone that she couldn’t see to him.

“Please,” she said, pushing on his shoulder. He rolled to his back and she stripped him of his boots, his trousers.

He lay before her naked. Not just nude, naked. There were no barriers between them. No lies anymore. For the first time, she saw him as _him_ , not as a mask he wore and presented to the world as protection. And he was magnificent. He was a man who failed and in failing became better. He was what everyone aspired to being, and he didn’t even see it.

Her fingers traced the lines of his muscles, watching them quiver with need and anticipation. Her touches were gentle and fleeting, there and gone again, and when he cursed her, she laughed. Imagine that. She _laughed_.

The laughter turned happiness to joy inside her, and as she straddled him, taking him into herself, she bent and whispered against his mouth, “I love you.” As he braced his feet against the ground and pressed into her, she whispered, “I cherish you.” As she rocked her hips against his, taking his cock deep into her body, she whispered, “I want only you.”

He cradled the back of her head, holding her lips against his, and he drank in her words with quiet groans of pleasure. “Evie, Evie,” he murmured, her name a benediction.

When she came for him, it was a gentle melting, a pleasure that spread through her in lazy waves. It lasted for an age, a sweet contraction of her body around his, and he stared at her, at them, at the place where his cock disappeared into her with a look of incredulous awe. And then he was coming, too, arching into her and filling her with heat and promise.

They stayed awake long into the night, curled around each other, making the sweet promises lovers in darkness had made since the dawn of time.


End file.
